DEVELOPMENT TRENDS IN CONTEMPORARY CONTAINER VESSELS DESIGNS

Permanent growth of sea trade demand has contributed to strong expansion of container carriers. The capacity of the worlds container fleet was about 3400 vessels in March 2005 and only one year later it reached the number of about 3800 ships. What is more, there are over 1000 container carriers in the worlds order book. The number of the biggest capacity container carriers is growing along with the number of container vessels at sea. The increasing demand for small feeders and feeders with higher trade capacity, meaning more TEU on board and higher en route speed resulting from higher number of large capacity container carriers that will call at a few main seaports, is predictable. These small feeders and feeders will trade between big container terminals and smaller ports as suppliers. Contemporary container vessels have a load carrying capacity of up to 14 000 TEU and it is foreseen that the capacity will reach 18 000 TEU with voyage speed amounting to 28 knots. It causes the necessity of using diesel engines whose output power is even 100000 kW with an efficiency of about 50% as the main ship propulsion. The container vessel fleet classification based on TEU number and trading area as well as configurations of marine power plants for the contemporary container vessels regarding main propulsion, electric power and boiler plants have been shown in the article. Moreover, the trends of ship hulls and marine power plants are discussed.